It's almost seven years since David Farr and Gísli Örn Garðarsson's highly physical version of Kafka's short story premiered at the Lyric, and it returns better than ever. If anything, this gruesome tale of a young Czech commercial traveller, Gregor Samsa, the sole breadwinner, who awakes one morning to find that he has turned into a giant insect, takes on an extra poignancy in a post-financial crash era.

In Börkur Jónsson's clever design, the split-level stage offers a downstairs that captures all the impoverished gentility of a family clinging to respectability, and an upstairs of strange perspectives. As Gregor's family increasingly fail to recognise the humanity beneath his outward appearance, we too look with skewed eyes, and immediately understand his confusion and isolation – something emphasised by Garðarsson's own desperate athleticism in the lead role.

The show's aesthetic – visual, physical and aural – is a big part of its success (the music is by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis), but so too is its openness to interpretation. At times it has the feel of a horror movie, with the family walking upstairs to face something loathsome in the attic; at others it seems like a political parable about the rise of fascism. It also offers itself as a family tragedy, as well as a story of how easily we come to torment those we love when they become a burden. Nína Dögg Filippusdóttir's Greta begins by defending her brother to her parents, but her neglect of him is more grotesque than their revulsion.

There are terrific performances from the ensemble, and if the show dips a little in the middle, it does recover itself and the last half-hour is heartbreaking. Not least in the way that it slyly suggests that the tragedy of Gregor Samsa will become the tragedy of millions in Europe who will be viewed as vermin to be exterminated.

• What have you been to see lately? Tell us about it on Twitter using #GdnReview